Networks, such as the Internet, provide infrastructure for a variety of online services. For example, vendors may set up Internet application servers to conduct business transactions. These application servers may include individual workflow processes for conducting these transactions, such as online processing of order entry, purchases, and/or delivery of goods or services. Alternatively, such workflow processes may be distributed across multiple application servers at different URL locations.
In multi-server workflow environments, a client browser establishes a browser session with an originating application server process, resulting in initialization of a session state. The session state may include communication resources that are allocated for the browser session or any application-specific information, such as user profile and account information.
During the browser session, the client browser may be redirected to a secondary application server process to perform a particular workflow task, such as order entry. After completion of the task, the client browser is redirected back to the originating server process for further workflow processing.